If you send a letter, the government can steam it open and read the contents. If you make a phone call, the government can listen in. Why should online communication be any different? This argument convinced UK politicians to vote the Investigatory Powers Bill into law in 2016. It required companies to "maintain permanent interception capabilities, including maintaining the ability to remove any encryption". The US and other countries soon followed suit. But we soon learned that the analogy was false, and efforts to give the government access to encrypted data have put us all in danger.
展开▼
